Choosing Smurfette by Luis V rey
What’s a Smurfette? That’s the question that frames the narrative of the Smurfs: The Lost Village movie. In the film’s backstory (rooted in the Smurf mythology from the comic books and the 80’s television show), Smurfette – the only girl Smurf we’ve ever known (and in Lost Village, she’s voiced by Demi Lovato) – was created by the wizard Gargamel out of blue clay to infiltrate Smurf Village and help Gargamel in his quest to find the Smurfs and steal their Smurf essence. In other words, Smurfette isn’t really a Smurf – she wasn’t born, she was made (and not in the way Feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir would approve). Even her name isn’t a real Smurf name, because, as Papa Smurf points out: “it doesn’t tell us anything about her, it doesn’t tell us who she is or what she does,” at least not like Brainy Smurf, Clumsy Smurf, or Hefty Smurf. So, what or who is she? What’s significant is that beyond the surface of the obvious message for the target audience (which celebrates diversity and suggests that we can be anything we want to be) is an existential debate on the nature of identity. Where does our identity come from? Are we defined by labels and names? As Gargamel sees it, Smurfette can never be a real Smurf. In his eyes, she will always be his creation – which, for Gargamel, means that her nature is evil, as he made her to serve him. As he tells her at one point, “You can’t escape your destiny.” But, for all the Smurfs in Smurf Village (who happen to all be male), Smurfette is one of them. They can’t define her – she has no clear identity other than being female – but they nevertheless accept her and consider her part of the group. While we might agree with the Smurfs on this, it’s not as easy as it seems. This is because Papa Smurf (who has the ability to wield a little Smurf magic now and then) changed Smurfette’s nature when she was initially sent to their village by Gargamel. He changed her short, wiry dark blue hair to long, wavy blonde hair and he seemed to brighten her white dress and matching shoes and hat, resulting in a very stereotypical and patriarchal image of what a “good” female Smurf should look like. As he remarks about her “she glows.” But her change wasn’t just physical, as her personality also changed from an aggressive nature to a caring nature. Although, she seemed to retain some of her assertiveness and willingness to break the rules, given that she takes the initiative to lie to Papa Smurf (or at least placate him with some feminine reverse psychology) so she can sneak out to trek through the woods to the Forbidden Forest – because she’d seen what appeared to be another Smurf from another village and she was too curious to just let it go. Thus, she was created by Gargamel as a “bad girl” Smurf and then recreated by Papa Smurf as a “good girl” Smurf. And, because she was made out of clay and therefore was not a naturally existing Smurf, her identity was questioned. It’s a dilemma. But, from an existentialist perspective, the dilemma has a solution – because as Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Simone de Beauvoir might suggest, no Smurf is really definable until they choose to define themselves. For example, Clumsy Smurf is indeed clumsy but that’s not really his identity, it’s just his name, his label. He happens to be very brave, following Smurfette to the Forbidden Forest and helping her in her quest to find the mystery Smurf – along with Hefty and Brainy Smurf. In fact, after the quartet of Smurfs finds a lost village (called Smurfy Grove) populated by only female Smurfs, Clumsy Smurf helps Smurf Storm (a warrior Smurf voiced by Michelle Rodriguez) and displays a keen ability to pilot a dragonfly (named Spitfire) and help Smurf Storm elude Gargamel’s giant predator bird named Monty. Had it been a Tolkien story, Clumsy Smurf would’ve been renamed to something cool like Urúvion, which means fiery in Sindarin Elvish – because Clumsy rode a fire-breathing dragonfly. For Tolkien, names absolutely define a character (it’s why Aragorn has seven other names). But the Smurfs aren’t Hobbits or Dwarves (or Dúnadan men of the west) and their names don’t change, regardless of how they act. Yet, for Smurfs, names are both a label and an identity. For most of us, they’re just a label. We don’t earn our names, we don’t change them, and they don’t really have anything to do with our nature. They’re just something assigned to us by our parents and the closest we come to earning a name is when we’re called something beyond the standard Joey and Jenny shortenings of Joseph and Jennifer, like Katniss becoming The Girl on Fire or The Mockingjay in The Hunger Games. For existentialism, however, Clumsy Smurf isn’t clumsy unless he wants to be – and as his excursion with Smurf Storm reveals, he doesn’t have to be. As Jean-Paul Sartre states: “man is what he wills, and as he conceives himself after already existing … Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself.” For Sartre, “existence precedes essence” because first we exist, then we define. It’s what Clumsy Smurf does and it’s what Hefty and Brainy do, too – in a more comical way, they adapt to the female Smurfs’ way of life, getting mud facials and massages while Clumsy is helping Smurf Storm. They forget about being hefty and brainy and, instead, focus on just being. In other words, Clumsy, Hefty, and Brainy don’t stay clumsy, hefty, and brainy. They experience other things and stray from their labels – though, to be fair, Brainy Smurf does explain that their labels simply indicate their dominant trait, suggesting that they have other characteristics. Returning to Smurfette, existing and then defining is what she does, too. Although Clumsy and Smurf Storm did their best to thwart Gargamel, the wacky wizard eventually finds Smurfy Grove and abducts every Smurf, but he leaves Smurfette behind because she’s not a real Smurf (which, for Gargamel means she doesn’t have any innate Smurf essence he can use). After a good (existential) cry, Smurfette embraces the fact that she’s not a real Smurf and she uses her different nature to defeat Gargamel – somehow, she’s able to engage Gargamel in a wizard battle that results in her dying and becoming an inanimate lump of clay. (they even hold a funeral for her before Kraang theif stolen Smurfette, after bieng caugthed by Night fury and drop down into a pieces) What’s important is that she decides this fate willingly and in doing so she defines herself as Smurfette, choosing to be a Smurf by giving her life for the sake of all Smurfs. It doesn’t matter that she was created as a lump of clay, what matters is that she identifies as a Smurf. Smurfette, then, isn’t a label and it isn’t an artificially created nature, it’s a choice. For Nietzsche, this choice is what he calls the “causality of the will.” As he states, “Whether we believe in the causality of the will … suppose, finally, we succeeded in explaining our entire instinctive life as the development and ramification of one basic form of the will – namely, the will to power.” If we do succeed, as Nietzsche explains, then we are the authors of our own lives with the ability to determine the reality of our existence. Where Sartre sees existence as preceding essence (we exist, then we will our identity), Nietzsche sees will as the causality of existence (first we will, then we exist). In either case, our existence and identity are dependent on our will and on the choices we make – before and after our existence. What’s different for Smurfette (as opposed to Clumsy, Brainy, and Hefty) is that she is able to exist in both a Sartrean and Nietzschean sense. Initially, her existence was Sartrean, having been created, her existence preceded her identity. But after she makes her choice and dies, she is killed by Kraang thief, and Decepticons, and Peter knock to Smurf village, and Kraang thief, and others leaving, eaten by T.rex, drop into a piece of matrix's stone, at the end of the film, crystal seed, crash landed into a mountain with all the colours of the rainbow, to trapped tartarus. In alternate timeline disney from hercules, A God father named Zeus created Smurfette, from cloud, she was infant smurfling, but she was made for clay locations, after later that time, Hera hold her baby brother taking caring her from Olympus gods, but Zeus's jealous brother Hades, and mocking her, plots to overthrow Zeus and rule Olympus